SOME BIRD WONDERS.
Geologically considered, the migration of birds had its origin in the beginning of the Post-Tertiary period of our globe’s history. Prior to the Glacial Epoch there was no migratory instinct among the feathered tribes of the earth’s fauna for the simple reason that there was no necessity for such a change of habitat.
Thus the annual recurrence of this phenomenon has been going on not since the creation, as many suppose, but for units of ages whose lapse can be reckoned only by millenniums of calendar years. It is not the time and place here to discuss the means by which this length of time can be even approximately determined, but there are certain inferences and conclusions which are well endorsed by scientific research.
For our present purpose it is quite sufficient to say that the Glacial Epoch wholly changed the climatic relations of the polar and middle latitude regions of our globe. From the semitropical conditions which once perennially existed there, these regions have since and for ages been subject to the intense cold which now periodically prevails within those limits.
There is a growing conviction among geologists that the intense cold of the Glacial Epoch was caused by a change in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. If this be true, then the “Great Winter” of astronomers was reigning in all its severity 210,000 years ago.
The wild goose, his near relatives, the brant and swan, and other aquatic feathered races, made their appearance on the fifth day of creation. “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
Now this fifth day of creation very nearly corresponds to the Triassic and Jurassic periods of Mesozoic Time in Geology.
Although “every winged fowl after his kind” is included in the bird category of this creative act, it has been thought, and for good reasons, that the more highly organized birds other than the aquatic tribes, did not make their appearance till the sixth day of the Mosaic account, which would be exactly represented by the Tertiary Period of Cenozoic Time. According to this view, then, the wild goose is an older denizen of our world than the smaller birds of passage which make their home on the land only.
But Geology fills up many niches and supplies many details left blank in the first chapter of Genesis. It is now one of the firmly established tenets among geologists that between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic times there came a tremendous disturbance in the earth’s crust.
In his “Story of the Earth,” Dr. J. Dorman Steele says, “The Mesozoic time, like the Palaeozoic, was closed by mighty upheavals. The conditions of life were changed. All the Mesozoic types disappeared; hardly any species survived the shock.” A few individuals did survive, however, and among them was our venerable friend, the wild goose.